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"Nine days."

"And the Council doesn't know."

"The Council knows exactly as much as I have permitted them to know, which is that my granddaughter is an unsealed ancestral Byrne with Fae blood and a demonstrated inability to control herself in public. They are not voting on your character. They are deciding whether you are an asset or a liability, and they have been told a great deal about the liability side by people who were pinned to a wall a fortnight ago."

There was no accusation in her voice, which somehow made the words feel like a slap.

I sat with my hands flat on my knees while the pieces rearranged themselves in my head. Delores. The chamber. Danika's obsession with Thursday. Everything she had been doing since I came back.

"You need to offer them a payment."

My grandmother looked directly at me, and for once she didn't hide behind a half-truth.

"I need to offer them a payment."

"A Byrne soul is worth more than all the covens in the world. You told me that when I was fifteen." I swallowed. "I thought you were bragging."

"I was warning you. You were fifteen and took it as a compliment, which is entirely my fault for the way I raised you."

"And I'm the only currency you have left."

"You are the only currency that has ever existed for this. Delores's essence would have purchased me a delay. A year, perhaps. You took that option from me on the chamber floor, and I have not been able to construct another one since." Her hands remained folded on the desk. "And I have looked, Hazel. I have spent a fortnight looking."

Lesson number twenty-nine: the worst conversations of your life are the quiet ones, in rooms with good chairs, with people who are being completely honest for the first time.

I looked across the desk at the woman who had raised me and realized I didn't want another carefully edited version of the truth. Not this time.

"Say it."

"Say what, exactly?"

"The whole thing. Out loud." I was surprised by how steady my voice sounded. "Say that you're going to sell me out."

Danika went quiet.

I waited for the denial. For outrage. For her to tell me that whatever else she had done, I was her granddaughter and there were lines even she would never cross.

For perhaps the first time in my life, I wanted Danika Byrne to lie to me.

She didn't.

"I have not decided yet."

And that, right there, was the single most frightening sentence anyone had ever said to me.

Chapter Fifteen

I spent the most important hour of my life so far in a laundromat on Clark Avenue, watching a demon come out of my jeans.

That is not a metaphor. There had been an actual demon on those jeans since Sunday night, and by Thursday morning they had reached a stage of decomposition where sitting beside them in a truck had become less of an inconvenience and more of a lifestyle choice. So we found a laundromat with four working machines and a change dispenser that took bills. I fed a fistful of quarters into one before lowering myself onto a plastic chair bolted to a metal rail to watch my entire wardrobe go around.

The place smelled like industrial detergent and somebody's cheap perfume. A woman two chairs down folded a mountain of tiny socks with the grim efficiency of someone who had done it four hundred times and no longer expected gratitude for the effort. Behind the counter, an old radio played nothing recorded after 1960, while a dusty fan in the corner turned its head slowly from one side of the room to the other, watching a tennis match nobody else could see.

River sat beside me with his ankles crossed, reading a flyer about a lost cat.

He had been strange all morning, and I'd put it down to the obvious. We were four miles from a building full of people preparing to vote on whether I should retain the privilege of walking around unsupervised, and River was a fallen angel sitting beneath fluorescent lights reading about a missing tabby named Mr. Pickles. Strange seemed like a perfectly reasonable setting for both of us to be operating at.

Except this wasn't normal River strange. He'd spoken maybe nine words since we left the motel, and twice I'd caught him staring at nothing with his head tilted slightly, as though he were listening to something happening on a frequency I couldn't hear. Each time I looked at him he snapped out of it almost immediately, his expression smoothing into the cool indifference he wore whenever he wanted the world to believe nothing could touch him.